Nicole pays

It’s Sundance. So, like, indie season. Is Nicole Kidman the first name that comes to mind when you think “indie”? This is where she says she’s at now. Smart. Kidman covers The Hollywood Reporter in its Sundance issue and acknowledges that she doesn’t work in big budget movies, her subtle way of saying the audience doesn’t accept her in them, and has instead refocused her career, choosing smaller projects like The Paperboy and Stoker, which is why she’s heading to Park City. And then she goes on to talk about the parts that inspire her and other people, like John Cusack and Lee Daniels and Baz Luhrmann talk about how fearless she is as an actor, and now you think the article, which is a good length, is probably boring but ...no, there is some dish, good dish.

Here’s my favourite part:

On this chilly California day, (Kidman) looks no worse for wear and arrives on time for a photo shoot for this publication dressed in black leggings and a sequined sweater. On the set, the ex-wife of Tom Cruise and Oscar winner whose paychecks have run as high as $20 million a movie dons some old Levi's jeans and a T-shirt from L.A. vintage emporium What Goes Around Comes Around and decides she has to have them. (Not the sort of clothes one associates her with, making it all the more interesting.) The antennae of the stylist and assorted staffers go on high alert. This usually is when the awkward dance of clothes-being-taken-for-free-by-celebrities-under-the-guise-of-being-proffered occurs.

Instead, Kidman, 45 -- a tasteful fashionista with the kind of willowy body that makes red-carpet designers giddy -- whips out her credit card and hands it to the stylist. "Never would I take free clothes," she says, turning up her famous nose. "That would be so ... tacky. These people work so hard to make beautiful things -- you have to appreciate that."

What does it say that she’s introduced first as “the ex-wife of Tom Cruise” before “Oscar winner”?

That’s not what I meant though when I said it was my favourite. Nicole Kidman pays for her sh-t. So does Celine Dion. Few of them do. Most of them expect it to be given. Then again, most of them don’t have her money. She can certainly afford it. So she does. It’s sad that this is a compliment, but in relation to her freeloading peers and the other cheap asses in her business, in this area in particular, she is an exception.

Here’s your favourite part:

One has to wonder whether this risk-taking actress found her groove after her 2001 divorce from the famous-for-control Cruise. During their marriage, she starred in Malice, Far and Away and Batman Forever; post-divorce, Birthday Girl, In the Cut and The Hours. It's pointed out to her that a recent issue (Jan. 16) of THR contains an excerpt from Going Clear, the new book on Scientology by Pulitzer Prize winner Lawrence Wright, in which her divorce from Cruise is blamed on the "cult" religion and heavily referred to. "I'll bet it is," she says to a reporter before quickly looking at something else in the issue. "My eye is going to a dress here -- that's how interested I am in this."

When pressed, she'll say only: "I've chosen not to speak publicly about Scientology. I have two children [adopted with Cruise] who are Scientologists -- Connor [the Red Dawn actor is now 17] and Isabella [20] -- and I utterly respect their beliefs." Vanity Fair's Scientology exposé and Wright's book both claim the Church turned them against her, something she'll neither confirm nor deny.

Um, not denying it is like confirming it, non? Otherwise, why wouldn’t you correct people when they assume that your kids won’t talk to you?

One final note before you click away to read the full article -- she looks GORGEOUS on this cover. It’s because her hair is obscuring the cheek fillers, and the way they’ve applied the lipstick, and the colour too, it all seems much less swollen.